![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Final-e1781055211371.jpg?w=2048\")
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Payments giant Visa is growing at its fastest rate in years, but it\u2019s not because of some of its latest innovations in digital currencies and agentic AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Visa first started offering stablecoin settlements in 2023 and now has 130 stablecoin-linked card issuing programs across 40 countries. It\u2019s also experimenting with agentic commerce, or allowing AI agents to make payments on their own.<\/p>\n
Yet just $7 billion of annual settlements on Visa\u2019s platform are made in cryptocurrencies, compared with $14 trillion overall.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hesitant to lean into the stablecoin and agentic commerce narratives too much,\u201d Chris Suh, Visa\u2019s chief financial officer, tells Fortune. <\/em>\u201cIf you look at our business today, the vast majority of it has nothing to do with those things.\u201d<\/p>\n Visa reported net revenue of $11.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 17% year-on-year. That marks the fastest growth for the company since 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cOur momentum in consumer, commercial and money movement is clearly strong and will strengthen with agentic commerce and stablecoins,\u201d said Visa CEO Ryan McInerney during the Q2 earnings call. \u201cIn many countries around the world, especially in emerging markets, consumers and businesses are increasingly using stablecoins as a store of value\u2026we are providing on-ramps and off-ramps with stablecoin-linked Visa cards.\u201d<\/p>\n Suh attributes Visa\u2019s growth largely to the \u201cmature fiat world\u201d it has long operated in, pointing to jumps in payments volume, cross-border payments and processed transactions, rather than its newer initiatives like stablecoins and agentic commerce. (In Q2, global payments volume was up 9%, cross-border volume was up 11% and total processed transactions grew 9%.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe state of our businesses in cross-border, domestic, debit and credit is incredibly good across all regions,\u201d Suh says. \u201cAgentic commerce and stablecoins are businesses Visa doesn\u2019t monetize very well today, and that could be brand new TAM for us to go after.\u201d<\/p>\n Suh\u2019s caution on stablecoins and AI constrasts with the more optimistic view from other Visa executives. Stephen Karpin, Visa\u2019s Asia-Pacific head, previously framed stablecoins as a key part of the company\u2019s strategy. \u201cWe want to make [stablecoins] one of the options to make and receive payments all around the world, when the regulatory environment is ready,\u201d he said to Fortune <\/em>in November. \u201cWe\u2019ve got some assets in the form of technology and capability, and want to help businesses large and small start conducting commerce in Web3.\u201d<\/p>\n Visa first unveiled its AI-powered commerce push in April 2025, rolling out Visa Intelligent Commerce, which allowed AI agents to shop and pay on a user\u2019s behalf. By late 2025, it had expanded its agentic commerce pilots to Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things missing from the current state of a LLM-powered chatbot is the ability to make payment via an agent,\u201d Karpin said last year during Visa\u2019s APAC launch of Intelligent Commerce.<\/p>\n Asia is one of Visa\u2019s fastest-growing regions, contributing around 14% of payments volume on Visa\u2019s platforms, up 6.5% year-on-year. Yet Suh adds that the region also serves as a lab for Visa\u2019s latest products. Asia has \u201cdifferent flavors of growth,\u201d combining emerging and mature markets.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJapan, for example, is a very unique market for us,\u201d Suh says. \u201cIt has a bigger cash percentage than any other tier one economy in the world, and that\u2019s an interesting landscape to operate in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He adds that Asia is the source of much of the innovation around payments.\u00a0\u201cWe see more digital wallets per capita in this region than anywhere else in the world,\u201d Suh says.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2023, Visa launched its Visa Flex Credential, with local issuer Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company. The technology allows users to consolidate up to five cards into a single credential; Visa later expanded the service to North America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve invested significantly in Asia\u2014our employees are local, our clients are local,\u201d Suh says. \u201cWhen we bring solutions to market, they\u2019re very customized to the markets we operate in.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the future of Visa\u2019s bets on stablecoins and agentic commerce, Suh remains positive that they\u2019ll pay off eventually\u2013even if they don\u2019t in the next few quarters. \u201cBoth agentic commerce and stablecoins are important investments that today don\u2019t have immediate ROI,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey won\u2019t pay off in the next six months, but could over the next six years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Visas #CFO #downplays #importance #stablecoin #agentic #commerce #U.S #payments #giant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Payments giant Visa is growing at its fastest rate in years, but it\u2019s not because of some of its latest innovations in digital currencies and agentic AI.\u00a0 Visa first started… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1450,460,8872,8979,8981,798,5279,8982,1123,1310,599,782,8980],"class_list":["post-6558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-agentic","tag-cfo","tag-commerce","tag-digital-and-mobile-payments","tag-downplays","tag-fortune-500-companies","tag-giant","tag-importance","tag-payments","tag-stablecoin","tag-u-s","tag-visa","tag-visas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Asia as \u2018test bed\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n